Mr. Speaker, I hear from a member of the Conservative Party that was the last government, but it has now been repeated by the present government.
I want to be very critical of the government. The Conservatives stand every single day in the House and talk about being a new government. This change could have been made in the budget. Then it would not have been necessary for the member for Essex to bring forward this private member's bill. The government had the opportunity.
The current Prime Minister was in my city during the election campaign in January. He promised that this change would be in the budget, but the member for Essex has had to bring the issue forward once again. The Prime Minister's parliamentary secretary had private members' bills in the House twice and he could not get the Prime Minister and the finance minister to put this into the budget.
We are not talking about a lot of money. Some $13.5 billion was put toward the debt. This injustice could be corrected by an amount in the range of $25 million a year, or smaller given the number of people who have passed away. The new government has not done that and I am calling on it to do so. There will be another budget in February or March 2007. We do not need this private member's bill for the government to do that.
What is the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, the member for Calgary Southeast, going to do if the budget comes down in 2007 and this is not in it. I have to ask the same thing of the member for Essex. What is he going to do? He is in government now and has the opportunity, finally, to do this. The Liberals would never do it. Both of those members are in government and have the opportunity to correct this injustice.
Then maybe that saintly lady from my church will stop cursing in church. Maybe she will have some peace. That incident was compounded by the fact that at the same time that this was happening, her husband contracted a serious illness and passed away within a year. She is a very bitter woman, but she is not the only one in this country.
As the member for Essex mentioned, he and I have been at a number of meetings in the last three years. The meetings are getting smaller because so many of the seniors have passed away. That bitterness and anger is there. We owe them a lot and we have fallen down. This injustice needs to be corrected, not five years from now when most of them will be gone, but immediately.
If the Minister of Finance is not prepared to stand in the House and say it before the budget, he has to guarantee that it will be in the budget. If not, there will be political ramifications in Essex and Calgary Southeast and any number of other ridings that the Conservatives hold in this country.